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Slobberknockered

Edward J. Snowden must be pleased with what he started. A group appointed by President Barack Obama in August to review the National Security Agency’s hugely controversial spying operations has finished its work, and, based on the early leaks and my own conversations, the resulting report is going to be a doozy.

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Expectations for the panel have been extremely low since its creation. According to administration and congressional officials I spoke with over the past three weeks, senior leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, and especially the NSA, were supremely confident back in August that their support in the White House was rock-solid and that any changes the panel might propose would be, in the words of one official, “largely cosmetic.”

Clearly, they were overconfident. The Review Group’s preliminary findings and recommendations are anything but cosmetic. The still-classified report of the five-person panel, whose official moniker is the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, recommends sweeping and far-reaching changes in the way the NSA conducts its electronic surveillance operations, from a greater degree of executive-branch oversight of the agency’s operations to the imposition of new limits on what data it can collect, especially inside the United States—a move almost certain to anger the NSA and its supporters inside the U.S. intelligence community. But the report also recommends that the agency be allowed to continue some of the most controversial of these operations, which will not please its critics on Capitol Hill and among privacy advocacy groups.

The result is that nobody in Washington will be entirely happy with the report’s findings. “There is something in this report for everybody to hate,” a weary White House aide who has read the classified version of the Review Group’s report told me.

But the intelligence community will likely be unhappiest of all.

U.S. intelligence officials I spoke with were clearly shocked by the Review Group’s recommendations, with one official admitting that he felt “slobbernockered” by some of the things the panel was reportedly recommending. It was supposed to be a group that wouldn’t rock the boat: former CIA No. 2 Michael Morrell, national security insider Richard Clarke, former Obama official Cass Sunstein, and two professors with establishment ties, Georgia Institute of Technology’s Peter Swire and the University of Chicago’s Geoffrey Stone. To make the agency’s predicament even worse, a federal judge ruled Monday that the NSA’s collection of the telephone records of Americans was almost certainly unconstitutional.

In my conversations, a number of senior American officials blamed the changed political climate in Washington for the report’s overall reformist thrust. Reflecting on the dramatic changes that have taken place since the first newspaper stories based on Snowden’s leaked materials began appearing back in June, one U.S. official noted that the NSA’s once-solid support inside the White House and on Capitol Hill has waned since the panel was created in August, and that the once cordial relationship between the White House and NSA has become distinctly “chilly” over the past two months.

NSA officials became concerned this fall when their memos were increasingly ignored and their phone calls to key officials in Washington, especially at the State Department, were not returned. And more ominously, rumors began to reach NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, that the review panel had been given new marching orders to be robust and searching in its report.

“We got the distinct impression that we were now lepers in Washington,” a senior NSA official recalled, adding, “Putting as much distance as possible between the White House and us was the order of the day.”

Intelligence officials confirm that it is true that over the past two months, thanks to the steady drumbeat of shocking newspaper exposés about the agency’s activities, the NSA has lost a good deal of support in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, and on Capitol Hill.

At the same time, the agency’s once harmonious relationship with this country’s largest high-tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, is now a shattered smoking ruin, NSA officials fret. Only the “big three” American telecommunications companies—AT&T, Verizon and Sprint—appear to remain firmly supportive, and even they are beginning to put some distance between themselves and the NSA as shareholders ask pointed questions about their clandestine relationship with the agency.

In this political climate, it was perhaps inevitable that the Review Group would recommend making substantive changes in the way the NSA operates. “We had to go this route,” a Review Group staffer told me in an interview. “If we did not recommend placing some additional controls and checks and balances on the NSA’s operations, the high-tech companies were going to kill us and Congress was going to burn the house down. Besides, our report is non-binding, so who knows what the White House is going to accept and what they are going to toss out.”

When asked what he thought NSA’s reaction to the panel’s recommendations was going to be, this source said, “Well, I’m not going to get any Christmas cards from [NSA director] Keith Alexander this year, but I think I can live with that.”

Matthew M. Aid is author of Intel Wars: The Seret History of the Fight Against Terror and The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency.